Chapter 125: Calculations Ain’t So Bad

He opened the laptop again almost at once, since the timer lived on it, and the corner of the living room lit up like a very small studio.

The camera stood where he’d left it. So did the easel, angled the way Rose had designed it, and the three calculus textbooks holding the clock at its shoulder. He had proved the thing could see. He hadn’t proved it could hear.

He stood where the host would stand, headphones on, and read his planned opening to the room. Then he played it back. His own voice, played back, always sounded like a stranger doing an impression of him. He ignored that and listened for volume.

The first line came out fine. Then he turned toward the easel, as anyone would, to point at the canvas, and his voice thinned out like it was leaving the building.

’Of course.’ The mic sat on his left. The easel was on his right. Every time he looked at the thing he was talking about, he talked past the thing recording him. The camera had needed a better angle. The mic needed better manners.

He dragged the stand eight inches toward the middle and aimed the capsule between his mouth and the easel. Every take waited for the refrigerator to cycle off, a thirty-second courtesy to an appliance. Same line. Turned. Pointed. Played it back.

Same voice. Same words. This time it stayed in the room. He listened to both takes back to back, a man in the next room and a man in this one, and didn’t need a graph to tell them apart. He put a strip of blue tape on the floor under the stand so Saturday’s version of him wouldn’t have to rediscover the answer.

He sent Rose a photo of the stand and the tape, partly as documentation and partly because she’d tease him about it.

Rose: Are we recording the cat, or preparing to record the cat?

Adrian: Preparing. The setup works.

Rose: Then it’s ready. Ready things get used.

He read it twice. She hadn’t said it unkindly. She’d said it the way you slide a coin across a counter.

Rose: You put tape on your floor.

Adrian: It’s a mark.

Rose: It’s a shrine to your microphone.

Adrian: It’s blue.

Rose: Of course it is.

He had two more colors in a drawer. She did not need to know.

Adrian: Saturday. The two sentences go up front so viewers know what they’re watching.

Rose: Fine. But they can’t box me in. If you write "the cat wears a monocle," I paint a monocle. That’s a request, not a painting.

Adrian: Clear rules help people follow it.

Rose: Clear isn’t narrow. A sentence should point me somewhere. It shouldn’t hand me the destination.

He considered it. If both prompts landed exactly where they pointed, the second reveal would just be the first painting wearing a different hat.

Adrian: So a direction. Not a picture.

Rose: Correct. I’ll put that on your tombstone.

Adrian: "He wrote a procedure for a cat."

Rose: And it was a good one.

Rose: Also, write yours like you want to see the painting. If it reads like a memo, I’ll paint a memo.

Adrian: A memo of a cat.

Rose: With a very serious border.

He stood in the middle of his living room, smiling at a phone, with blue tape on the floor and no witnesses. She’d improved the plan by arguing with it. He found that he wanted her to enjoy it, not just finish it.

Jenna called instead of texting, which meant she had an opinion and no patience for punctuation.

He answered in the voice he used for invoices. She noticed, and let it sit, which was how he knew she had.

"Sentences on screen," she said. "I like it. But what’s the viewer supposed to be thinking while Rose paints?"

"That she’s painting."

"That’s what people think at a dentist."

He had framed it as a pacing problem: fifteen minutes was long, so keep the cuts tight. Jenna had framed it as a motive. Hers was harder to argue with, which was what motives did to pacing.

"Should viewers see both sentences before the timer starts?" he said.

"Yes. And Rose shouldn’t."

"She has to know the prompts."

"She knows the cat. She doesn’t see the sentences until it’s her turn." Ice clinked, which he took as the sound of her enjoying herself. "Viewers read them first. They guess what she’ll do. They argue about it in the comments, and arguing is free marketing. Then they watch her find out. She’s the only one in the video who’s surprised."

It was annoying how much better an idea got when someone else said it. He ran it forward. Viewers got a bet. Rose got a surprise. Nobody could predict the paintings, because even the person making them didn’t know what she was walking into.

"Rose is going to hate not knowing."

"Rose is going to love it," Jenna said. "She’ll complain first."

"The second painting stays covered?"

"Under a towel. A real one, not a metaphor."

"I own towels."

"I’ve seen them." A pause, exactly as long as it takes to hear what you just said. Neither of them took it.

"And your sentence?" Jenna said, too fast.

"Haven’t written it."

"If it contains the word ’orange,’ I’m hanging up."

He pulled a sticky note toward him and crossed out his first draft.

"Saturday," Jenna said. "Ten. Bring snacks."

He tested the opening and the audio together, since those were the two things that could still embarrass him. Timer set, two placeholder sentences on screen, record. He read the opening exactly as written.

"Hello, and welcome to the first of what we hope will be many challenges, in which two people each write a sentence and a third person paints both."

He stopped before it finished. On paper it had been clear. Out loud it sounded like a man reading terms and conditions to a hostage.

He didn’t add an explanation. The explanation was the problem. He cut it down until only the parts that did work remained, said it again, and listened.

"One cat. Two sentences. Fifteen minutes."

Three and a half seconds. The first version would have taken eleven, and lost the room by ’many.’ Six words, and they worked. The sentences appeared under them and the timer started on its own, and for the first time the video sounded like it knew where it was going.

He picked up the phone and scrolled back to Tim’s messages. Supplier invoices. Job costs. Who owes what. Three piles, Tuesday at four, and a list of questions he’d already built.

Tim: Found out. Spreadsheet, binder, Dom’s memory.

Adrian: Which one wins?

Tim: The memory. Loudly.

He didn’t add to the list. He wrote one new sentence above it: Is this costing Dom time, money, or both?

Everything else depended on it. A shop that lost an hour a week was a tidying job. A shop that lost parts money was a problem, and problems had prices. He left the solution line blank. He hadn’t seen the binder.

The Corolla notification sat in the system, still open. He didn’t connect the two. Dom was a man with a problem, not a key, and he wasn’t going to treat him like one. Dom would smell a pitch from across the shop.

At nine he did the whole thing once, front to back, as if it were real.

Mic on the tape. Timer ticking down from fifteen. The two placeholder sentences up on screen, the canvas wearing its towel, and the camera aimed over the easel at a space where Rose would eventually be. He stood at the mark, said the six words, and then did the hardest thing a host could do, which was stand there while nothing happened for a full minute.

He watched it once. Audio clean, framing clean, the towel hanging straight. One problem. The lamp’s glare turned the timer on the laptop into a white smear by the third minute, and a viewer squinting at a smear would stop watching.

He tilted the laptop screen back ten degrees. The glare slid off it like it had never lived there. He didn’t buy a hood, a filter, or a $46 anything. He moved a screen, and the problem moved with it.

He recorded thirty seconds again and checked the timer. Readable at a glance, even from the couch. He saved the file as TEST_03 and left it alone.

It wasn’t a hit. It wasn’t a video. It was a corner of his living room that could do what it was bought to do: a camera that saw, a mic that heard, an opening that took six words. Nineteen hundred dollars, and now it had a job.

He sent the clip to the group chat with no caption.

Rose: The towel is crooked.

Jenna: It’s a real towel. Not a metaphor.

Adrian: Noted.

The system hadn’t said a word all evening, and he realized he’d stopped listening for it somewhere around the tape.